Would you mind me asking you a question? It is pretty obvious that you are good at algorithms. Would you mind sharing how you got good at them?
I ask because although I am decent at programming as well as putting together the general structure of a program I seem to be weak at algorithms and have not had much success while trying to improve. Any advice: books / methodology is welcome.
I've been stuck in this exact same place for the last one year or so. I wanted a job in machine learning or possibly NLP and python is my language of choice, while the language is an excellent tool for these tasks I have not been able to find jobs in ML or NLP possibly because both of these fields involve quite a bit more than the programming related work.
To top this off I live in India and it has been difficult to find quality jobs here; the ones that will hire a less experienced person like me, of course :-)
I am writing a search engine. The main purpose was to work on a large project to give myself exposure and polish as a programmer (sysadmin by trade). The crawling and indexing systems are done now. I am finding the ranking to be the most challenging part but it is quite fun overall.
What sort of development environment are others here using for go (if using it at all, of course) ? I've had reasonably good experience with the go-mode in emacs.
I'm using vim with the vim plugins that come in go/misc/vim. I use :Import and :Drop for adding and removing imports, and :Fmt to run gofmt in vim. I also have a git pre-commit hook that runs gofmt.
I'm one of the project owners on the GoClipse project. I do a lot of polyglot development (Java, Javascript, C, Go, & a little Python). I've used and liked vim, Sublime w/ GoSublime, and GoClipse. All with gocode. I have a hard time escaping Eclipse, in general, because of my skill profile. It kind of unifies the experience.
Interesting that sublime text comes up. I have been looking for a "bells and whistles" sort of IDE for python for a few days now, I am traditionally a unix person so I have moved along nicely with both vim and emacs as needed, but at this point I need to work with a full featured IDE.
I am using the evaluation version of pycharm and I must say it is quite impressive, although paying for an editor does seem odd after using emacs for so many years but it is a well designed software and I think worth the price.
That said I have been asked to give sublime text a try and I must say it looks a lot better than pycharm, I think will give it a try next (it is certainly a lot cheaper and if I understand correctly has much wider language support than pycharm).
Sublime Text will never be a bells-and-whistles IDE like PyCharm or PyDev on Eclipse, it just won't work that way. The question is whether the extra niceities offered by those IDEs offer enough productivity gains over their heavyweight design which leads to them being clock-time slow to get things done (launching, navigating around files etc. etc.)
I think for experienced devs, a text editor is quicker for dynamic languages (less experienced people will get good mileage from an IDE). Go is sort of weird in that it reads like a dynamic language, so a text editor is Good Enough, while the static compiler helps to catch the sort of bugs that float up when you're doing manual (and hence, human-error-prone) refactoring work, like changing the type of something, which IDEs tend to automate for you before compile time. That's why GoSublime really is all you need for Go, as far as I can tell. (NOTE: I've not written anything like even a medium project in Go).
Since posting my comment about sublime text, I went ahead and downloaded and gave it a try. I must say it seems to fit my needs as far as python is concerned quite well, from the short time I spent with it.
It hits the sweet spot between emacs and pycharm quite nicely and I am at this point inclined to buy a license, I think an IDE is more useful for languages like java or scala but for python sublime text will do for me.
Re. the use cases for an IDE, my point was that as my side projects keep growing in size, I need something which is smart about things like refactoring, comprehensive autocomplete, support for debugging etc.
I use Acme, simply because it's got good buffer management and a useful editing language. I also used go-mode about a year ago, before I got sick of emacs.
LiteIDE X (http://code.google.com/p/liteide) is a small, portable IDE for Go with package management, build management, and compilation from within the IDE. Also, light debugging support. And, OSS, of course. I've used it on smallish Go projects without problems.
The screen resolution is an issue for me as well. I think they should have been able to fit in 1440x900 in a 13.3 inch size, similar to what the larger macbook airs ship with, which makes working on two editor or IDE panes side by side somewhat possible.
Thanks a lot, especially for the names of the books. After reading yours and other advice in this thread I am convinced that the way to get up to speed quickly would be to start with harder problems and backtrack as needed. Do you have any recommendations on books on analysis, the one I have with me is Walter Rudin.
I studied in a school that uses the Moore method along with the Professor's notes. This meant that any analysis textbooks were kind of banned. Rudin however is supposed to be fine (a bit harder but that is what you probably need). Also, Spivak is so freaking good that once you are done with that, Rudin should become much much easier to grasp and follow.
Thank you, fortunately I was able to find an economy edition of both books (Linear Algebra and its applications by Strang though) after reading your post, so I have lots of work to do now. Also I don't know how I missed probability in my original post. That has been one of my weak areas and definitely needs fixing.
I ask because although I am decent at programming as well as putting together the general structure of a program I seem to be weak at algorithms and have not had much success while trying to improve. Any advice: books / methodology is welcome.
Thanks